Sample chapters on the Kindle

I love the ability to download free sample chapters for my Kindle — when I see a review or even just a mention of an unknown book (for example, on Quora or on Goodreads), I first go to Amazon to check out the reader reviews. If the book has four stars or more, I will scan a few of the reviews. If it seems I might like the book, and a free sample for the Kindle is available, I download that.

On the Kindle, I made a collection called “Samples.” I move all the samples into that collection, and I don’t read them until I’m casting about for the next novel to read. I have discovered some wonderful novels this way, including the amazing Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (about more later, in another post).

Reading marathon: Cutting for Stone

Ten days in Lombok, a Kindle, and Abraham Verghese’s novel, Cutting for Stone: bliss. I haven’t been this enraptured by sheer storytelling since, maybe, The Kite Runner. Somehow the exotic setting (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) made me recall the palpable sense of place in The Kite Runner, even though Khaled Hosseini’s Afghanistan does not overtly resemble Verghese’s Ethiopia. I think it was my full immersion in the characters’ lives in this foreign place that made me connect the two reading experiences.

There’s one disappointment for me, and oddly, it comes from the obsessive attention paid to the operation known as “cutting for stone” in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, books which could hardly be more different from Verghese’s. At the end of book 2, I think it was, our Daniel Waterhouse is “cut for the stone,” and we are not sure whether he will survive it. This comes after much pain and considerably more talk about urination than I have ever read in any other book.

In Verghese’s wonderful novel, many amazing medical procedures are described in excruciating detail — but cutting for stone is never once described, or even explained. There is a tantalizing quotation from the Hippocratic Oath: “I will not cut for stone, even for the patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners …” but even this is not referred to within the story. An important character, a surgeon, is named Stone, and we are left with only that as a motive behind the title.

Anyway, I had to go and look up the gory details about the meaning of the part of the oath that requires a physician to pledge not to cut for stone. Although I looked up some things about Samuel Pepys (a real person who figures in Stephenson’s saga, and who famously recorded much about his “stone” in his diary), I found satisfaction in the Wikipedia entry for lithotomy (anther way to say cut for stone). Pepys’s (and Daniel’s) stone was in his bladder — hence all the discussion about peeing — and what made the operation so dreadful was that there was not yet any general anesthesia.

In a 1967 lecture, Sir Ian Fraser said “no one has seen” lithotomy for 100 years, and it “would strike terror into the heart of any modern surgeon” — but the procedure was common in the mid-1800s.

I found Cutting for Stone a wonderful read, hard to put down, and somehow I read 600+ pages in 10 days (I was on vacation for 6 of those, and there were planes and airports too). Another excellent book it called to mind was A Suitable Boy — and for all those who called Verghese’s novel “a family saga” or something like that, I beg to differ. A Suitable Boy is really, truly a saga about a family, while Cutting for Stone is much more focused on our narrator and his life.

Hating to Come to the End

The Kindle tells me I am 80 percent done with Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World, the third and final book in The Baroque Cycle. I’ve renewed my acquaintance with Daniel Waterhouse, and now I find he resembles a spry old-man version of Anathem‘s Erasmus. That makes me smile.

We haven’t really seen much having to do with the Longitude. I’m disappointed. However, I’ve been enjoying the business concerning the Pyx, which I’d never heard of before. The relationship between Daniel and Isaac Newton is very fun to witness.

Reading this volume is making me want to go straight back to Quicksilver when I’ve finished. Crazy.

Novels I Want to Read Again

This is a little different from a list of favorite novels, but I think if you want to reread a novel, certainly that must mean you enjoyed it a lot.

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. As mentioned in a previous post, I’m reading Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle now, and it’s made me itchy to revisit the descendants of those characters, who populate this book.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is my favorite author, bar none, although I don’t love every one of his novels. This remains his masterpiece, a remarkable book like no other I’ve ever read. Strange, even disturbing; seductive, irresistible. That’s how I remember it.

AEgypt (Ægypt), four novels by John Crowley. My first Crowley book was Little, Big, and maybe someday I’ll reread it too. I’ve already read AEgypt twice, and yet I really want to go back to that place, that strange and wonderful moment, when the world pivots on its hinge and can become something different from what it was.

The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver. I read these so long ago, I barely remember anything except that I really liked reading them, I ripped through them quickly, and I loved the characters. Recently I read Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, and I positively adored it (Mexico and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera — what’s not to like?), so I’d like to try these again.

Ubik, by Philip K. Dick. When I was 17 (a long, long time ago), I made a project of buying every used paperback by Philip K. Dick I could find. I devoured them for a few months, although I don’t think I ever did read everything he wrote. Since then we’ve had several movies based on his books (some better than others; I’m a big fan of Blade Runner, but I thought The Adjustment Bureau wasn’t all that great); he’s become more widely known, and new editions have been published. I’ve read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at least three times, but I haven’t reread Ubik since that spring and summer when I was gorging myself on Dick’s oeuvre. I remember Ubik as being among the best.

The Lord of the Rings, three novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. This is another long-ago love I would like to revisit. I read them (along with The Hobbit) in high school, and then again as an undergraduate in college, but never again since then. Of course, I’ve seen the movies. They made me want to read the books again, because I know there’s so much more in the books.

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. I read this early in 2011 and utterly adored it. The first 100 pages or so were really difficult for me — it’s like one of those science-fiction novels where the world is so different that everything has names you never heard before (like a new language), and the author has just dropped you down in the center and explains nothing. Anathem does have a glossary in the back, though, so there’s some help. This book is nothing like The Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon (mentioned above): The setting is a world in which the smartest people live cloistered in communities like Medieval European or Buddhist monasteries, except they are secular, and the technology of the time is well advanced beyond that of Medieval Europe. Very original, and filled with fun characters!

Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle

I’m reading the third book (of three) now: The System of the World. That means I have already read the other two, Quicksilver and The Confusion. If you have seen these books but never read them, maybe you find that surprising — each of these comprises more than 800 pages, and they are set in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Because of its large size, the first volume was so awkward to read in bed, I was driven to buy a Kindle for reading the next one!

But let’s back up — I hated the first book when I first attempted it. I was bored. I felt greatly overburdened by whatever was going on in the first hundred or so pages. I put it back on the shelf. My best friend loved it, tore through all three books and then promptly reread them (!) — all the while urging me to, please, try it again. I thought she was nuts.

Then I read Anathem, Stephenson’s 2008 novel about … well, save that for another post. (It’s quite separate from The Baroque Cycle.) I loved that book so much, I wanted to reread it immediately (despite a length of 900+ pages). It’s certainly one of the 10 best books I have ever read. And that got me thinking about Quicksilver again. Surely if Stephenson, with his phenomenal talent, had written a three-book series, extending to more than 2,600 pages (!), it couldn’t be as awful as I remembered it. I must have been in the wrong mood for it, I thought.

Probably true. I started rereading Quicksilver in the summer, and other than the unbearable weight of the hardcover book pressing down on my stomach while reading in bed (even resting it on a pillow hardly helped), I had a wholly different experience this time. Loved Jack (although at first I found him too much a boy’s character, and therefore very annoying). Loved Eliza even more (although she too at first seemed way overdone — I mean, kidnaped by Barbary Corsairs! Raised in — where was it? Some sultan’s harem?). Found Daniel and all that Cromwell crap a bit hard to love, and that morass of British titles — torture! Yet this time around I found myself swept up as I had not been before, and I galloped through to the end. Oh, also I did not appreciate the insanely detailed descriptions of every peg and plank of the stupid ship in which Daniel seems about to die at any second (for about 400 pages). Nor the turn-by-turn instructions on every street and alley and bridge of London (yawn …).

It’s not an easy read. Trust me, this book is not for the lazy. The payoffs, however, are great.

I held off moving on to read The Confusion for reasons having to do with summer and travel and logistics. I picked it up (on the Kindle, a big improvement) about a month ago, and the great payoffs really came home. Eliza is smack in the middle of everything, from Louis XIV’s court at Versailles to the machinations of war between England and Holland. There’s more business on boats, but finally Stephenson seems to have gained some balance (or a better editor) so that he doesn’t have to draw us a freakin’ blueprint of the poop deck every time someone walks on it. Don’t get me wrong — I love this author, but he really needed a ruthless editor for Quicksilver, and clearly that’s not what he had.

Now I’m reading The System of the World, and Daniel is back on center stage (and back in London), and although there have been some instances of “Please don’t give me turn-by-turn directions for walking from the Tower Bridge to some back alley a mile away, because I really, really don’t care,” for the most part the story has been nipping along nicely, and I can’t wait to get to the parts about longitude! (There — I’ve exposed my inner geek.)

What I think is so brilliant about these books is the scope and scale. (Puritans! “The Pretender”! Pirates!) The best historic novels always have that — they tend toward vastness — but Stephenson has, I think, exceeded all previous parameters. Jack has sailed around the world, for heaven’s sake! (Well, for Eliza’s sake, really.) He experienced the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico! He anchored off the shores of Japan! Frequently seen characters include not only Louis XIV and William of Orange but also Leibniz and Isaac Newton — and both of them are frequently prominent in the story!

I know I’m going to need to reread Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) after this is all over. I loved that book so much, I recommended it to everyone — but now I find it hard to remember. (It has been 10 years since I read it.) There was the undersea cable, of course. Deep sea diving. Rather too much detail about gutta-percha, as I recall. Bletchley Park. And Shaftoes. Of course, there were Shaftoes in it. Heh.

Alchemy. In the third book, we are coming back to that, and again I am wondering (as I did while reading Quicksilver) — has Neal Stephenson read John Crowley’s AEgypt (Ægypt) tetralogy? Has John Crowley read The Baroque Cycle? They should — they both should! Although Crowley doesn’t care about the technology (clocks, gunpowder, logic engines), his deep interest in alchemy and the whole wild ride of Giordano Bruno in his masterpiece seem (to me, at least) terribly complementary to Stephenson’s magnum opus. Although Crowley’s folks are running around in a Europe 100 years prior to Stephenson’s, and Crowley is a more literary writer than Stephenson, and Crowley cares not a bit about a system of economics (but he cares a great deal about magic), nevertheless I sense a kinship between the two authors. I really do.

But would geeks — technology geeks — enjoy Crowley? I don’t know. He tends more to fantasy (although not the kind with dragons), yet I wouldn’t feel too uncomfortable calling AEgypt speculative fiction. And when I look at Bruno and John Dee and Edward Kelley (and even Emperor Rudolf II in Prague), I see them as the direct ancestors of Leibniz and Isaac Newton — and certainly Enoch Root.

Crowley and Stephenson are two of my favorite writers. It’s fun to think of them as mutual admirers.